Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

206 CONCLUSION
was already present in the times of slavery and it did not necessarily clash with the slave order. Capoeira
was thus always more than just a weapon used by slaves. Furthermore, capoeira contributed to the
configuration of the slave community and the redrafting of ethnic and social boundaries.
Capoeira therefore worked—according to the specific context—both as a tool for open resistance and as
an instrument of low-profile resistance, of lower-class ‘infrapolitics’. However, despite causing permanent
headaches to police chiefs during the Brazilian Empire, capoeira did not function as an unambiguous
weapon of class struggle. Slaves never constituted a homogenous class, and fault lines in slave society did
not always neatly oppose black slaves on one side and white owners on the other. Capoeira was a deadly
weapon that could be appropriated by whoever was willing either to learn the techniques or to employ its
adepts. Hence it was used as a device by urban gangs of thugs and gunmen in the service of the powerful.
Capoeiras entered military barracks and the militia, and went to new battlefields wearing the uniforms of
the Brazilian Empire. Yet the infiltration of state institutions also resulted in capoeira’s dependence from
that particular regime and provoked its demise as an independent art. The regime change of 1889 thus
eradicated most of the culture of capoeira in Rio de Janeiro.
Bahian capoeiras, in contrast, were less systematically involved in local politics and preserved more of
its rituals and traditions—up to the present. Its epic tales allowed adepts to re-enact the valiant struggles of
the past. Capoeira heroes (or anti-heroes) from Bahia continue to provide role models for younger
generations. Capoeira taught adepts how to indulge in the art of vagrancy, and how they could fool the
establishment. The aim of Bahian capoeiras was to survive using—not overthrowing—the system. At the
same time, practitioners learned elaborate body techniques and rituals, which were transmitted by older
mestres but also re-invented by each generation. Furthermore, through vadiação adepts developed their
musical and poetic skills.
No doubt the anti-clockwise circle of the roda with its rituals often carried transcendental meaning for
adepts. Capoeira developed in a society where faith was central to people’s preoccupations and religious
practices were deeply embedded in everyday life. That spiritual meaning, however, evolved according to the
social context. ‘Prehistoric’ (because undocumented) forms of capoeira and other African combat games
possibly included dialogue with transatlantic ancestors. Yet these meanings are neither documented for
combat games in Central Africa prior to the twentieth century nor did they survive in the Diaspora. Of
course capoeira retained in Brazil, and in Bahia in particular, strong connections to slave religious practices.
But slaves and their descendents practised different religions and worshipped many gods, and thus no
unique, all embracing religious meaning was ever attached to capoeira practice in Brazil. The idea of
capoeira as an ancestral cult of ‘crossing the kalunga’, is based on present-day knowledge of Central
African religious traditions, and was re-invented by Afrocentric militants in the United States during the
1990s. Hence it represents one of the new, contemporary meanings of globalized capoeira.
The modernization of capoeira resulted in a fragmentation not only of styles but also of its social
functions. Former meanings did not disappear altogether, but shifted, and new ones emerged, associating
and overlapping with older ones. Contemporary capoeira can still be a deadly weapon. The art provides
advanced practitioners with a powerful tool of self-defence and enhances their self-assurance, both of which
are useful assets in the jungle of our cities. Capoeira always helped to maintain form and more generally the
good health of its adepts. It is well known that capoeiristas who regularly practise can do so until a very
advanced age. Modernization has meant that sportive and therapeutic functions are not only more explicitly
recognized and analysed, but also that the art was taken out of its traditional context (the roda), to the
‘academies’, and, subsequently, to the therapy rooms in order to fulfil these specific purposes. One of the
new meanings capoeira acquired in the context of modern society is to preserve bodily skills familiar in
‘traditional’ societies, which have been lost in the process of modernization. Marcel Mauss already